To meet the many sophisticated market-driven needs of television broadcast consumers, middleware platform providers such as those that communicate content data to subscriber set-top boxes need to access content (i.e., applications/data) that are deployed across multiple heterogeneous broadcast and Web enabled networks. These networks are generally based on a respective U.S. or European industry digital broadcast standard including, for example, Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) (including DVB-C (cable), DVB-T (terrestrial), and DVB-S (satellite)); OpenCable™ Applications Platform (OCAP); Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC); National Television Standards Committee (NTSC); GI Motorola network; Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) standards; and so on.
Before distributing content to low resource clients such as set top boxes, middleware providers generally pre-process the content. Such pre-processing includes, for example, parsing all referenced content (i.e., Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs)) embedded in content to ensure that embedded URI syntax conforms to the specific syntax required by the network wherein the referenced content is deployed. To accomplish this, a separate URI schema must be maintained at the middleware provider for each supported network. That is, if the provider supports content referencing across n networks, the provider needs to maintain and resolve URI syntax against each of the n separate/distinct schemas to ensure that each network's required syntax is enforced.
If a middleware provider is to remain competitive and meet the needs of television consumers, the provider needs to enforce URI syntax against at least a portion of different schemas required by respective different network standards. Unfortunately, procedures to maintain multiple separate/distinct schemas for each supported network are typically time consuming, labor intensive, and expensive. Additionally, parsing URI syntax against multiple separate/distinct schemas is processing and memory intensive.
Moreover, in a low-resource environment (meaning that a client such as a cable and satellite set-top box has limited memory and/or processing resources), the amount of memory reserved for program data is limited. Making this situation more difficult, content providers develop embedded applications for hosting by low resource clients that reference content deployed on multiple different networks. Since each different network has respective URI syntax resolution semantics, these applications must include mechanisms to resolve the specific semantics of one or more different URI syntaxes. This increases application program size and processing requirements, both of which are contrary to substantially optimal program data requirements of a low resource (i.e., memory and/or processing resources) client.
The following described arrangements and methodologies address these and other limitations of referencing content in a television-based entertainment system.